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Academies Accounts Return

Upload your financial data

The Department has developed automation technology to help reduce the burden of submitting your financial information. This technology enables you to electronically submit your trial balance data directly from your financial management software to the Department, where it will then be used to pre-populate up to 80% of your Accounts Return.

This technology is dependent on your underlying data being complete but we envisage this can deliver huge time saving benefits to the sector.

Can I use this service?

We work with a number of software suppliers that altogether cover the majority of the sector. Please contact your supplier to understand if they have this automation functionality set up and how to use it to send your financial data. If your supplier is not aware of the functionality please ask them to contact the Department and we can provide information on how they can integrate.

Please find the guide for automating the academies account return 2025/26 here Accounts Return Automation Guidance

My supplier has the automation functionality. What next?

  1. Contact your supplier and follow their process to upload your financial data.
  2. When you next sign into your Accounts Return you will be presented with a Data Uploads page where you can decide what to do with the data:
    • Apply: the data will be used to pre-populate the trial balance cells in your Accounts Return. Note that if there is already data in these cells they will be overwritten by this new data upload. Non-trial balance fields will not be impacted. You will receive a warning message to confirm this before the acceptance is performed. Following an import, page statuses will update and validations will clear or trigger according to the new data. Further validations may trigger as you go on to complete each page.
    • Reject: the data is deleted and will not pre-populate your Accounts Return. If you decide that you should have accepted the upload, you must resubmit the data via your financial management system again. You will receive a warning message to confirm this before the rejection is performed.
    • Ignore: the data will not pre-populate your Accounts Return but it is saved in the background so that you can return to this screen later to accept or reject it. If you submit more than one set of data without accepting or rejecting it, only the latest submitted data will be available - i.e. You’ll lose your previously ignored uploaded data. You can access this ignored data through the Data Uploads link which is located on the top right hand side of every screen.
  3. The Data Uploads page will keep track of your data acceptance/rejection history. You can see this anytime in the ‘Activity History’ section on the bottom right hand side of the index screen.
  4. If you have sent your financial data but cannot see it on the data uploads screen try pressing the ‘Check for FMS data’ button on this screen.
  5. If a data upload is pending you will see a tag on the fixed ‘Data uploads’ link at the top right of the screen. Clicking the link will take you to the screen to action the new pending upload.
  6. Once you have accepted your data upload into your Accounts Return, you will need to check it is correct. To easily identify which cells have been pre-populated from your finance system (rather than completed manually) these cells have been tagged with ‘Automated’ underneath them. This field level tracking functionality will be turned on as a default when you accept data into your form. You can turn it off/on using the button on the right hand side of the index screen. Please note this button is only visible after you have accepted the data and the field level tracking can only be seen by the preparer and internal reviewer roles.
  7. If you need to make amendments to the pre-populated cells you can either:
    • Change the data manually by deleting the automated figure and typing in your own. Note that this will change the field level tracking tag for those cells from ‘Automated’ to ‘Modified’.
    • Make the adjustments in your finance systems and upload a new set of trial balance data. Note this will overwrite all automated cells including those you may have previously changed manually - n.b. Manual cells (those that can’t be automated) will be unaffected.
    • Note – uploads from your finance system will only be possible up to the point the form is sent through the approval cycle. After this no more uploads will be accepted, even if the form is sent back to preparer stage. All changes will thereafter need to be made manually.
  8. Enter your data in the non-trial balance cells which cannot be automated.
  9. Clear any validations and follow the normal approval process to submit the Accounts Return to your trust and auditor approvers.